Sunday, August 2, 2009

In Which I Do Many Silly Things In The Name Of Interior Decorating

We may have begun our move in May, but I believe that today is the first day I can officially call this apartment "home." I put up curtains.

For me, curtains mean a long-term relationship with a place. I mean, artwork you can slap up anywhere, furniture can always be rearranged, but curtains do not translate well to other houses. Curtains are something you put up when you are planning to stick around a while. And you know what? We really like it here. So I hung up our first curtain rod today in the library (really the office, but considering there are over 700 books in there I think calling it a library is perfectly justified) and Connor and I headed out to do some shopping.

Now because it is apparently not physically possible for me to make any decisions without rendering them as complicated as I can possibly make them, I went to World Market and promptly fell in love with a curtain. I say "a" curtain, because it was the last one in the store. They only had one panel, the display model, but it was on sale and in my blissfully ignorant state I was sure I could pick up another one online. I bought it and two white liners and then headed home happy. At least, I was happy until I looked the curtain up online and discovered that:

a.) World Market was the only supplier of this curtain.

b.) World Market was totally sold out of this curtain online.

So I gritted my teeth and called up to Seattle. It's only about a half an hour away, so I figured I could swing it. No luck. BOTH stores in Seattle were sold out. Evidently a lot of people also thought it was a good looking curtain. In a last desperate move I called the Olympia store. They had two left. I had them hold one at the register and drove almost fifty minutes one way to pick it up.

Irrational? Highly. No doubt I could have waited until they came back into stock. For that matter, I could have returned that curtain and gotten a different one. But since it's the time of the month when rational decisions generally don't have anything to do with my actions (all of you ladies know exactly what I mean) no other curtain would do. It had to be THAT one, and I had to have the project finished today, because otherwise I'd lose all momentum and would be stuck with one curtain for weeks. Also it was a challenge, and I couldn't possibly let the curtain, you know, win. Or something. I'm not entirely sure what my line of reasoning was there. Poor Connor. I'm probably not very easy to live with right now.

At any rate, I found the curtain (and picked up a pillow that coordinates for our cobbler's bench-- that weird piece of furniture with my painting supplies sitting on top of it) and took it home, which is where I discovered that instead of purchasing white curtain liners I had purchased white top curtains. You can't put two top curtains on one pole, and our apartment complex requires liners on all curtains. Did I return the liners? No. Rational decision-making is a no-go right now, remember? I currently have curtains with liners that are held on with safety pins and scotch tape.

But they're up now, and they look good. And all of the sudden, there's a room in the apartment that feels like it's totally, completely ours. While Connor could care less, I'm pretty sure the cats agree with me. Cricket seems to approve of the pillow, anyway.

Now I just have to do the rest of the windows. I think I'll wait until my brain returns before I make the attempt.

About The Author

I'm Connor's Mom. That pretty much explains everything. I mean, raising the epicenter of cuteness in the universe is tough, but it has its moments, all right.
I should probably mention that Connor has a submicroscopic, subtelomeric unbalanced translocation 46xy der t(1)(1;15)(q42;q26.2)-- an extremely rare chromosomal disorder. He keeps me on my toes!